Metaphor and Memory E-Book

Cynthia Ozick

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 482

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

From the author of The Messiah of Stockholm and Art and Ardor comes this collection of supple, provocative, and intellectually dazzling essays. In Metaphor ### Memory, Cynthia Ozick writes about Saul Bellow and Henry James, William Gaddis and Primo Levi. She observes the tug-of-war between written and spoken language and the complex relation between art's contrivances and its moral truths. She has given us an exceptional book that demonstrates the possibilities of literature even as it explores them.

Leseprobe

Cynthia Ozick is the author of numerous acclaimed works of fictionand nonfiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Critics CircleAward and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Man BookerInternational Prize. Her stories have won four O. Henry first prizes and,in 2012, her novel Foreign Bodies was shortlisted for the Orange Prize forFiction. She was born in 1928 and currently lives in New York.

Novels

Trust (1966)

The Cannibal Galaxy (1983)

The Messiah of Stockholm (1987)

The Puttermesser Papers (1997)

Heir to the Glimmering World (2004)

(published in the United Kingdom in 2005 as The Bear Boy)

Foreign Bodies (2010)

Shorter fiction

The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971)

Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976)

Levitation: Five Fictions (1982)

Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1969)

The Shawl (1989)

Collected Stories (2007)

Dictation: A Quartet (2008)

Essay collections

All the World Wants the Jews Dead (1974)

Art and Ardor (1983)

Metaphor & Memory (1989)

What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers (1993)

Fame & Folly: Essays (1996)

Quarrel & Quandary (2000)

The Din in the Head: Essays (2006)

Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (2016)

Letters of Intent (2016)

Drama

Blue Light (1994)

Miscellaneous

A Cynthia Ozick Reader (1996)

The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (introduction 2001)

Fistfuls of Masterpieces (1982)

Metaphor & Memory

CYNTHIAOZICK

Metaphor & Memory

ESSAYS

First published in the United States in 1991 by Vintage Books,a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Published in e-book in Great Britain in 2017 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Cynthia Ozick, 2017

The moral right of Cynthia Ozick to be identified as the author of this work has beenasserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyrightowner and the above publisher of this book.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 110 7

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

FOR

YUDEL AND GNESHA

Contents

Forewarning

Cyril Connolly and the Groans of Success

William Gaddis and the Scion of Darkness

Italo Calvino: Bringing Stories to Their Senses

The Sister Melons of J. M. Coetzee

Primo Levi’s Suicide Note

What Drives Saul Bellow

Henry James’s Unborn Child

Emerging Dreiser

George Steiner’s Either/Or

O Spilling Rapture! O Happy Stoup!

A Short Note on “Chekhovian”

Crocodiled Moats in the Kingdom of Letters

Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character

On Permission to Write

The Seam of the Snail

Pear Tree and Polar Bear: A Word on Life and Art

Washington Square, 1946

The Function of the Small Press

Of Basilisks and Barometzes

The Apprentice’s Pillar

The Muse, Postmodern and Homeless

North

The Shock of Teapots

The Question of Our Speech: The Return to Aural Culture

Sholem Aleichem’s Revolution

A Translator’s Monologue

S. Y. Agnon and the First Religion

Bialik’s Hint

Ruth

Metaphor and Memory

Forewarning

Here is a late learning: a fiction writer who also writes essays is looking for trouble. While stories and novels under the eye of a good reader are permitted to bask in the light of the free imagination, essays are held to a sterner standard. No good reader of fiction will suppose that a character’s ideas and emotions are consistently, necessarily, inevitably, the writer’s ideas and emotions; but most good readers of essays unfailingly trust the veracity of non-narrative prose. A story is known to reflect in its “attitudes” the concrete particularities of its invention; every story is its own idiosyncratic occasion, and each occasion governs tone, point of view, conclusion. A story, in brief, is regarded as an ad hoc contrivance, and if it is called as witness, it is in the court of the conditional, the subjective, the provisional, even the lyrical.

An essay, by contrast, is almost always hauled before the most sobersided court of all, presided over by judges who will scrutinize the evidence for true belief: absolute and permanent congruence of the writer and what is on the page. An essay is rarely seen to be a bewitched contraption in the way of a story. An essayist is generally assumed to be a reliable witness, sermonizer, lecturer, polemicist, persuader, historian, advocate: a committed intelligence, a single-minded truth-speaker.

But when a writer writes both stories and essays, something else can happen: the essays will too often be forced into a tailoring job for which they were never intended. The essays, like chalk marks, are used to take the measure of the stories. The essays become the stories’ interpreters: their clues, or cues, or concordances, as if the premises of the essays were incontrovertibly the premises of the stories as well. As if the stories were “illustrations” of the essays; as if the essays expressed the ideational (or even at times the ideological) matrix of the stories.

All these notions are, I am afraid, plain foolishness. They imagine that there is a commanding difference between essays and stories, and that the difference is pure: essays are “honest” and stories are made up. The reality is otherwise: all good stories are honest and most good essays are not. Stories, when they succeed as stories, tend to be honest even when they concern themselves with fraudulence, or especially then (Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych comes instantly to mind); stories are moods—illuminations—that last in their original form. A new story will hardly contradict a prior one: each has worked for, and argued, its own embodiment, its own consummation. Stories are understood to represent desire, or conviction, at its most mercurial. Originality, in fiction, means mercurial. Nobody wants all the stories a writer produces to resemble one another, to conform to a predictable line. The truth of one story is not implicated in the truth of the next.

But essays are expected to take a “position,” to show a consistency of temperament, a stability of viewpoint. Essays are expected to make the writer’s case. Sometimes, of course, they do; I feel fairly sure the book reviews in this volume incorporate judgments that time and temper will not seriously alter. Yet most essays, like stories, are not designed to stand still in this way. A story is a hypothesis, a tryout of human nature under the impingement of certain given materials; so is an essay. After which, the mind moves on. Nearly every essay, like every story, is an experiment, not a credo.

Or, to put it more stringently: an essay, like a story or a novel, is a fiction. A fiction, by definition, is that which is made up in response to an excited imagination. What is fictitious about the essay is that it is pretending not to be made up—so that reading an essay may be more dangerous than reading a story. This very foreword, for instance, may count as a little essay: ought it to be trusted? (Remember the Cretan captured by Greeks. Questioned, he replied: “All Cretans are liars.” Was this a truthful confession, or only another sample of a Cretan lying? After all, even Tolstoy, whom we think of as the quintessential novelist, was a kind of Cretan. First he wrote Anna Karenina; then he wrote “What Is Art?”—condemning the writing of novels. Which Tolstoy should we believe?)

The point is not that essays are untrustworthy. Obviously, an essay will fail if it is not intellectually coherent, if it does not strike you as authentic (ideas must be earned, not merely learned), if it is not felt to be reliably truth-telling. An essay must show all these indispensable signs of consonance and conscience—but only for the duration of its reading, or a bit longer. If its “authenticity” is compelled to last much beyond that, the reader will be tying the writer down by small stakes and long strings, like Gulliver; and no essayist (except maybe a Gibbon or a Montaigne—certainly no contemporary essayist) is as big as that. In other words, if a writer of stories is also a writer of essays, the essays ought not to be seized as a rod to beat the writer’s stories with; or as a frame into which to squeeze the writer’s stories; or, collectively, as a “philosophy” into which to pen the writer’s outlook.

Does all this mean that virtually no essay can have an enduring probity? Well, if a story can be empowered with constancy and incorruptibility, so can an essay; but only in the same way, contingent on its immanent logic or marrow-song. No story, and no essay, has the practical capacity to act itself out in the world; or ought to. All the same, if it seems that I am denying plausible truth-telling to the essays in this book, or that I don’t want them to represent me, it isn’t so: each, little or long, was pressed out in a mania of (ad hoc, occasional, circumstantial) conviction: the juncture—as in any fiction—of predicament and nerve. The essays herein do represent me: didn’t I tackle them, shouldn’t I “take responsibility” for them, whatever unease (or even alienation) they may cause me afterward? What I am repudiating, though, is the inference that a handful of essays is equal to a Weltanschauung; that an essay is generally anything more than simply another fiction—a short story told in the form of an argument, or a history, or even (once in a very great while) an illumination. But never a tenet.

CO.

April 17, 1988

Metaphor & Memory

Cyril Connolly and the Groans of Success

I first came on a paperback reprint of Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise when I was already in my despairing middle thirties. Though I had been writing steadily and obsessively since the age of twenty-two, I was still mainly unpublished: a handful of poems, a couple of short stories, a single essay, and all in quirky little magazines printed, it seemed, in invisible ink. Connolly’s stringent dissertation on the anatomy of failure had a morbid attraction for me: it was like looking up one’s disease in the Merck Manual—I knew the symptoms, and it was a wound I was interested in. One day I urgently pressed my copy of Connolly on another failed writer a whole decade younger than myself; we were both teaching freshman composition at the time. He promised to read it; instead he hurried off into analysis and gay pride. I never saw the book again. My ex-colleague has, so far, never published. Enemies of Promise went out of print.

After that, I remembered it chiefly as a dictionary of low spirits; even as a secret autobiography. Over the years one of its interior titles—“The Charlock’s Shade”—stayed with me, a mysterious phrase giving off old mournful fumes: the marsh gas writers inhale when they are not getting published, when they begin to accept themselves as having been passed by, when envy’s pinch is constant and certain, when the lurch of humiliation learns to precede the predictable rebuff. Writers who publish early and regularly not only are spared these hollow desolations, but acquire habits of strength and self-confidence. Henry James, George Sand, Balzac, Mann: these amazingly prolific presences achieved as much as they did not simply because they began young, but because they were permitted to begin young. James in America started off with book reviews; so, in London, did Virginia Woolf.

But in my despairing thirties it was hardly these colossi of literary history I was fixed on. All around me writers five years older and five years younger were having their second and third novels published, establishing their idiosyncratic and intractable voices, and flourishing, sometimes with the left hand, this and that indomitable essay: Mailer’s “The White Negro,” Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” Roth’s “Writing American Fiction,” Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” Styron’s reply to the critics of Nat Turner, and so on. John Updike, the paramount American instance of early publication, conquered The New Yorker in his twenties, undertaking even then the body of reviewing that nowadays rivals the amplitude and weight and attentiveness of Edmund Wilson’s. At about the same time, in the New Rochelle Public Library, I pulled down from a high shelf of the New Books section a first volume of stories called By the North Gate. The author was an unknown writer ten years my junior; not long afterward, the name Joyce Carol Oates accelerated into a ubiquitous force. A good while before that, in college, I had known someone who knew Truman Capote; and Capote had published in magazines before he was twenty.

In short, these were the Famous of my generation, and could be read, and read about, and mulled over, and discussed. They were—or anyhow they embodied, they were shot through with—the Issues; and meanwhile I was a suffering onlooker, shut out. I could not even say that I was being ignored—to be ignored you have first to be published. A hundred periodicals, both renowned and “little,” sent me packing. An editor who later went to Hollywood to write Superman led me into his Esquire cubicle to turn back a piece of fiction with the hard-hearted charm of indifference; he looked like someone’s baby brother. Another day I stood on the threshold of the office of the New York Review of Books, a diffident inquirer of thirty-five, and was shooed away by a word thrown out from a distant desk; I had come to ask for a review to write. Partisan, Kenyon, Sewanee, American Scholar, Quarterly Review, Furioso, dozens of others, declined my submissions. An editor of a small Michigan periodical, a poet, wrote to remark that I “had yet to find a voice.” In New York, a respected reader at a well-known publishing house, having in hand three quarters of my novel, said it wouldn’t do, and rocked me into a paralysis of hopelessness lasting nearly a year. And all the while I was getting older and older. Envy of the published ate at me; so did the shame of so much nibbling defeat. Twenty years of print-lust, muscular ambition, driving inquisitiveness, and all the rest, were lost in the hurt crawl away from the locked door. I wrote, and read, and filled volumes of Woolworth diaries with the outcry of failure—the failure to enter the gates of one’s own literary generation, the anguish of exclusion from its argument and tone, its experience and evolution. It wasn’t that I altogether doubted my “powers” (though often enough I did, profoundly, stung by disgrace); I saw them, whatever they were, scorned, disparaged, set outside the pale of welcome. I was ashamed of my life, and I lived only to read and write. I lived for nothing else; I had no other “goals,” “motivations,” “interests”—these shallownesses pointing to what the babblers of the hour call psychological health. Nor was it raw Fame I was after; I was not deluded that publishing a first novel at twenty-five, as Mann had done, would guarantee a Buddenbrooks.

What I wanted was access to the narrowest possibilities of my own time and prime; I wanted to bore a chink. I wanted a sliver of the apron of a literary platform. I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be— not to have a “career,” but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer. I was a haunted punctuator, possessed stylist, sorter of ideas, burrower into history, philosophy, criticism; I wrote midnight poetry into the morning light; I burnished the sentences of my prose so that each might stand, I said (with the arrogance of the desperately humiliated), for twenty years. And no one would publish me.

For this predicament, it was clear, I needed not an anodyne, but salt— merciless salt. Connolly not only supplied the salt, he opened the wounds, gave names to their mouths, and rubbed in the salt. He analyzed—or so it appeared—all the venoms of failure. He spoke, in a kind of metaphoric delirium borrowed from Crabbe, of “the blighted rye,” “the slimy mallow,” “the wither’d ears”—all those hideous signs of poison and decomposition from which the suffocated writer, kept from the oxygen of the age, deprived of print, slowly dies. There was no victory crow to be had from reading Connolly. If he provoked any sound at all, it was the dry cough that comes with panic at the dawn’s early light.

This, at least, is how, all these years, I have kept Enemies of Promise in my head: as a mop and sop for the long, long bleeding, the intellectual slights, the disgraced imagination, the locked doors, the enervating growths of the literary swamp, the dry cough of abandonment. The rest I seem to have forgotten, or never to have noticed at all, and now that the book is once again on the scene, and again in paperback, I observe that it is a tripartite volume, and that, distracted by what I believed to be its diagnostic powers, I missed two thirds of its substance. What I once saw as a pillar of salt turns out to be, in fact, a puff of spun sugar. And this is not because I have “gotten over” the pounding of denigration and rejection; I have never properly recuperated from them, and on their account resent the white hairs of middle age with a spitefulness and absurdity appropriate only to the hungry young.

“Enemies of Promise was first published in 1938,” Cyril Connolly’s 1948 Introduction begins, “as a didactic enquiry into the problem of how to write a book which lasts ten years.” Yet the question of literary longevity is raised and almost instantly dropped; that this particular book has now “lasted” more than four decades is hardly the answer. And I am not sure it has lasted, at least in the form it claims, i.e., as an essay about certain ideas. It hangs on instead as a curiosity, which does not mean it is wholly obsolete; it is only peculiar. Even in organization there is peculiarity: a trinity that does not immediately cohere. The first section divides prose style into Mandarin (a term Connolly takes credit for coining in this context) and vernacular; surely this issue is with us as bemusedly as ever. The second section—“The Charlock’s Shade,” which so fed my gripes and twinges—now looks to be not so much about failure as about success and its distractions. The third part, finally, is a memoir of Connolly’s childhood in a boarding school for the rich called St. Wulfric’s, and afterward at Eton. In my zealously partial reading long ago, though I was attracted by Connolly’s definitions of Mandarin and vernacular diction, it appears I never took in the autobiographical segment at all; and what drew me to “The Charlock’s Shade” (or so it now strikes me) was three lone sentences, as follows:

Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting as a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope.

Sloth in writers is always a symptom of an acute inner conflict, especially that laziness which renders them incapable of doing the thing which they are most looking forward to.

Perfectionists are notoriously lazy and all true artistic indolence is deeply neurotic; a pain not a pleasure.

Here, and only here, was the poisonous wisdom that served my travail. All the rest supposed a sophistication and advancement that meant nothing to a writer who had barely begun, and Connolly’s classifications of dangers hardly applied. To succeed as a writer, he admonished, beware of journalism, politics, “escapism,” sex, and success itself. Journalism: never write “a review that cannot be reprinted, i.e. that is not of some length and on a subject of permanent value.” Politics: once the writer “has a moment of conviction that his future is bound up with the working classes . . . his behaviour will inevitably alter”—in other words, he will be much improved. “Escapism”: drink, drugs, talk, daydreaming, religion, sloth. Sex: hazards of homosexuality, domesticity, babies, wives. And, aha, success: here the peril lies in getting taken up by the upper crust, according to E. M. Forster’s dictum as cited by Connolly: “To be aristocratic in Art one must avoid polite society.” But how could any of these cautionary alarms have mattered to a writer who had for years gone altogether unnoticed? Speaking for myself: I never thought about politics. Journalism was something less than a snare, since no one would offer me so much as a five-hundred-word review. I was in no danger of becoming a fad or a celebrity. I didn’t drink or shoot up. I confined religion to philosophical reading, and daydreaming to a diary. I had no baby and no wife. (Connolly, though he mentions Virginia Woolf among the Mandarins, has an ineradicable difficulty in positing a writer who is not male. This is a pity, because the writer’s husband is a worthy, perplexing, and often tragic subject.) Even talk was no drain; what went up into air for others, I mainly put down in letters to literary friends—letters, those vessels of calculated permanence. Then what in Connolly could possibly appeal to the untried and the buried? In his infinite catalogues of “promise” and its risks, only the terrors of perfectionism and the pain of sure decline had the least psychological concurrence. For the sake of this pins-in-the-ribs pair, Connolly stuck.

He begins now to unstick. “It was Edmund Wilson who remarked that [Enemies of Promise] was not a very well-written book,” Connolly confesses. Wilson was right. Connolly is a ragged writer, unraveling his rags behind him as he goes, and capable of awful sentences. If Wilson recoiled from some of them, it might have been in part on account of Connolly’s description of Wilson’s own Axel’s Castle, which, we are reminded, “includes essays on Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Proust, Joyce and Gertrude Stein. His summing up,” Connolly continues in a typically unpunctuated long breath, “is against them, in so far as it is against their cult of the individual which he feels they have carried to such lengths as to exhaust it for a long time to come but it is a summing up which also states everything that can be said in their favour when allowance for what I have termed ‘inflation’ is made.” (Observe that the style is neither Mandarin nor vernacular, but Rattling Boxcars.)

Patches of this sort might unglue any essayist, but there is something beyond mere prose at stake. Did Connolly notice that his so-called enemies of promise were in reality the appurtenances of certain already-achieved successes? The warning that journalism threatens art applies, after all, only to fairly established writers long familiar with the practice of getting paid for writing. “He is apt to have a private income, he renews himself by travel,” Connolly says of the homosexual writer, assuming long-standing privilege and money. A successful wife, he remarks, not only is “intelligent and unselfish enough to understand and respect the working of the unfriendly cycle of the creative imagination,” but “will recognize that there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” And of course: “Of all the enemies of literature, success is the most insidious.”

Does failure ever appear at all in Enemies of Promise—the word or the idea? Once. “Failure is a poison like success. Where a choice is offered, prefer the alkaline,” and that is all. Such sentiments burn rather than salve. And even while cautioning against the “especial intimacies” of the fashionable, Connolly has a good word for them: “It must be remembered that in fashionable society can be found warmhearted people of delicate sensibility who form permanent friendships with artists which afford them ease and encouragement for the rest of their lives and provide them with sanctuary.” And in defense of the seductions of wealth not one’s own: “It is because we envy [social success] more than other success that we denounce it so often,” Connolly explains. He himself does not denounce the ingratiation of writers with the rich so much as their ingratiation with one another:

There is a kind of behaviour which is particularly dangerous on the moving staircase—the attempt to ascend it in groups of four or five who lend a hand to each other and dislodge other climbers from the steps. It is natural that writers should make friends with their contemporaries of talent and express a mutual admiration but it leads inevitably to a succession of services rendered and however much the writers who help each other may deserve it, if they too frequently proclaim their gratitude they will arouse the envy of those who stand on their own feet, who succeed without collaboration. Words like “log-rolling” and “back-scratching” are soon whispered and the death-watch ticks the louder.

The death-watch? If there is any warning being rattled in all this, surely it must compete with the complicit wink of the sound counselor. A denunciation, one might say, that has the look of a paragraph in a handbook on the wherewithal of success. And a wherewithal that, at a particular rung of society, is affable enough: the comfortable network of class and school associations.

It is the moment for bluntness. Enemies of Promise is an essay—according to the usual English conventions of the early part of the twentieth century— about class and modishness. It has almost no other subject important to Connolly. There are digressions on, say, age, that are nearly worthwhile— more worthwhile when the apergu is not Connolly’s own (though the syntax is): “Butler said an author should write only for people between twenty and thirty as nobody read or changed their opinions after that.” There is much recognizable humanity in this, whereas Connolly, attempting to generalize in his own voice, manages mainly a self-indulgent turn: “The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.” Or: “It would seem that genius is of two kinds, one of which blazes up in youth and dies down, while the other matures, like Milton’s or Goethe’s. . . . The artist has to decide on the nature of his own or he may find himself exhausted by the sprint of youth and unfitted for the marathon of middle age.” As if one could choose to be Milton or Goethe merely by deciding, as Connolly advises, to “become a stayer.” Modishness dominates: the notion of likely styles in will, the short-length will and the longer-range.

Modishness rules especially in the politics. Writing in 1948 (the famous year of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four), Connolly suggests that he has “retained all the engagingly simple left-wing militancy [of 1938] since it breathes the air of the period.” True enough: ten years after its composition, Connolly is offering us Enemies of Promise frankly as a period piece. But the point of the exercise, we are bound to remember, is that ten years after its composition he is also offering it as a successful instance of “how to write a book which lasts ten years.” Are we to conclude, then, that the more a book is dated, the longer its chances of survival? A remarkable hypothesis. No, it won’t wash, this period-piece candor: Connolly had no wish to revise or update or tone down the “left-wing militancy” (less “engaging,” forty-five years later, and in an age of left-linked terrorism, than he might have supposed); perhaps it was only “artistic indolence.” Or perhaps it was because of an intuition about his own character and its style: a certain seamlessness, the absence of self-contradiction. Connolly is always on the side of his own class, never more so than in his expression of “left-wing militancy.” It is not that Connolly, in 1938, is mistaken when he declares that “today the forces of life and progress are ranging on one side, those of reaction and death on the other,” or that “fascism is the enemy of art,” or that “we are not dealing with an Augustus who will discover his Horace and his Virgil, but with Attila or Hulaku, destroyers of European culture whose poets can contribute only battle-cries and sentimental drinking songs.” He means Hitler: but the very next year, in 1939, the year of the Hitler-Stalin pact, would he have been willing to mean Stalin too? “The poet is a chemist and there is more pure revolutionary propaganda in a line of Blake than in all The Rights of Man” he asserts: a sophistry that can only be the flower of an elitist education. In 1938 what literary intellectual was not moved by the word “revolutionary”?

Nothing, in fact, is less dated than the combination of Connolly’s elitism and his attraction to revolutionary militancy. Any superficial excursion into universities in Western Europe and the United States currently bears this out, nowhere more vividly than in American elitist departments, history, literature, and political science especially. All this is a cliche of our predicament as it was of Connolly’s. “The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose,” Orwell wrote in Inside the Whale, and here is Connolly as prooftext: “Often [solidarity with the working classes] will be recognized only by external symptoms, a disinclination to wear a hat or a stiff collar, an inability to be rude to waiters or taxi-drivers or to be polite to young men of his own age with rolled umbrellas, bowler hats and ‘Mayfair men’ moustaches or to tolerate the repressive measures of his class.” This wizened sentence may be worth the belly laugh due anachronism, but its undigested spirit lingers on. For “disinclination to wear a hat” substitute an earnest inclination to wear Che boots. And “the repressive measures of his class” is as bruisingly trite and vacuous as any bright young Ivy graduate’s assault on the American bourgeoisie, of which he or she is the consummate product.

The consummate product of his class. Should Connolly be blamed for this? Probably. Orwell went to the same schools at the same time, Eton preceded by St. Cyprian’s (St. Wulfric’s in Connolly’s genial account, Crossgates in Orwell’s lugubrious one), and saw straight through what Connolly thrived on. Orwell despised the tyrant-goddess who ruled over St. Cyprian’s; Connolly maneuvered to get on her good side. And of Eton Connolly writes (in the ardently arrested parochial tone of one of the “bloodyminded people at the top”), “My last two years of Eton. . . . were among the most interesting and rewarding of my whole life and I do not believe they could have been so at any other public school or in any other house than College.” The allusion is to school elections; Connolly was, we learn, an ecstatic member of the exclusive “Pop,” which he counts, along with romantic homoerotic adolescence, among those “experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools . . . so intense as to dominate their lives.” Orwell, reviewing Enemies of Promise soon after its appearance, hoots: “He means it!” And sums up the politics of those cosseted few who, between 1910 and 1920, after “five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery,” have fabricated sympathies they have no way of feeling: “Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labor—hardly even words. No wonder,” Orwell charges, “that the huge tribe known as ‘the right left people’ found it so easy to condone the purge-and-Ogpu side of the Russian regime and the horrors of the First Five Year Plan. They were so gloriously incapable of understanding what it all meant.”

Nothing in his brief 1948 introductory note to Enemies of Promise tells us whether Connolly did or did not remain one of the right left people a decade later. “We grow up among theories and illusions common to our class, our race, our time,” Connolly opens his schooldays memoir, but only as a frame for the apology that follows: “I have to refer to something which I find intolerable, the early aura of large houses, fallen fortunes and county families common to so many English autobiographies.” He ends by fretting over whether “the reader can stomach this.” What is even harder to stomach is a self-repudiation that is indistinguishable from self-congratulation. The memoir itself, with its luxuriant pleasure in “our class, our race, our time,” its prideful delight in British Platonism, “popping up in sermons and Sunday questions . . . at the headmaster’s dinner-parties or in my tutor’s pupil-room,” its insurmountable glorying in the stringent achievements of an English classical education—the memoir itself repudiates nothing, least of all the narrator’s background, character, or capacities. To preface such an account of high social and intellectual privilege with the hope that it can be “stomached,” and then to proceed with so much lip-smacking delectation, is, as Orwell saw, to understand nothing, and to stop at words.

Words, it turns out, are what deserve to last in Enemies of Promise—not Connolly’s own sentences, which puff and gasp and occasionally strangle themselves, but the subject of his observations about styles of prose. Critical currencies have altered in the extreme since Connolly first set down his categories of Mandarin and vernacular, and unless one reminds oneself that these terms once had some originality of perspective (they are not so facile as they sound), they drop into the hackneyed posture they now permanently evoke. It is true that the New Criticism, which had the assurance of looking both omnipotent and immortal, has come and gone, and that the universal semiotics shock even now hints at softening, if not receding (though only slightly, and then out of factionalism). And other volumes of this kind, siblings or perhaps descendants of Enemies of Promise, have ventured to record the politics and history of the writer’s predicament— among them critical summaries by Malcolm Cowley, Van Wyck Brooks, John Aldridge, Alfred Kazin, Tony Tanner, Tillie Olsen. The post-Connolly landscape is cluttered with new literary structures of every variety. All the same, Connolly’s report on the increasing ascendancy of journalistic style over the life of contemporary fiction—language stripped of interpretive complexity, language stripped even of “language,” i.e., of the resources of the lyrical or intellectual imagination—remains urgent. The Mandarin “dialect,” as Connolly intelligently calls it (and he is wary in his praise of it, especially when it decays into dandyism, “the ability to spin cocoons of language out of nothing”), has now given way to a sort of telegraphic data-prose, mainly in the present tense, in which sympathies and deductive acuities are altogether eliminated. In poetry, the minimalists (whether in all their determined phalanxes they know it or not) are by now played out, moribund, ready for a turning; only the other day I heard a leading subjectivist, a lineal heir of William Carlos Williams, yearn aloud to sink into a long Miltonic sequence. But among fiction writers, the fossilized Hemingway legacy hangs on, after all this time, strangely and uselessly prestigious. (I attribute this not to the devoted reading of Hemingway, but to the decline of reading in general.)

Connolly’s distinctions and his exposition of them, however, address the adherents of both “dialects.” “From the Mandarins,” he exhorts, the writer

must borrow art and patience, the striving for perfection, the horror of cliches, the creative delight in the material [a phrase that itself arouses horror], in the possibilities of the long sentence and the splendour and subtlety of the composed phrase. From the Mandarins, on the other hand, the new writer will take warning not to burden a sober and delicate language with exhibitionism. There will be no false hesitation and woolly profundities, no mystifying, no Proustian onanism.

From the “talkie-novelists,” he continues—i.e., from the laconic anti-stylists influenced by film—the new writer can acquire the “cursive style, the agreeable manners, the precise and poetical impact of Forster’s diction, the lucidity of Maugham, last of the great professional writers, the timing of Hemingway, the smooth cutting edge of Isherwood, the indignation of Lawrence, the honesty of Orwell,” as well as the gift of construction. (It is notable that in nearly fifty years not one of these names, not excluding Maugham and Isherwood, has lost its high familiarity, and Orwell, in fact, has increased in prestige.) The defects of realist or colloquial style Connolly lists as the consequence of “flatness”—“the homogeneity of outlook, the fear of eccentricity, the reporter’s horror of distinction, the distrust of beauty, the cult of violence and starkness that is masochistic.” Nowadays we might add the conviction of existential nihilism. “It is no more a question of taking sides about one way or another of writing, but a question of timing,” Connolly sensibly concludes. All these are good and salubrious particulars—though it is worth recalling that, in prose at least, and wherever we find ourselves in the cycle of reaction, there are no stripped-down Conrads or Joyces; and that modernism never turned its back on plenitude.

As for my own disappointment in encountering Enemies of Promise after so long a hiatus: it was never Connolly’s fault that I made up a book that wasn’t there. I wanted to brood over failure. Connolly presides over the groans of success. He knows no real enemies—unless you count the threat to revolution ambushed in Mayfair moustaches.

Published in The New Criterion, March 1984

William Gaddis and the Scion of Darkness

Carpenter’s Gothic is William Gaddis’s third work of fiction in thirty years. That sounds like a sparse stream, and misrepresents absolutely. Gaddis is a deluge. The Recognitions, his first novel, published in 1955, matches in plain bulk four or five ordinary contemporary novels. His second,//?, a burlesquing supplementary footnote appearing two decades later, is easily equivalent to another three or four. Gaddis has not been “prolific” (that spendthrift coin); instead he has been prodigious, gargantuan, exhaustive, subsuming fates and conditions under a hungry logic. His two huge early novels are great vaults or storehouses of crafty encyclopedic scandal—omniscience thrown into the hottest furnaces of metaphor. Gaddis knows almost everything: not only how the world works—the pragmatic cynical business-machine that we call worldliness—but also how myth flies into being out of the primeval clouds of art and death and money.

To call this mammoth reach “ambition” is again to misrepresent. When The Recognitions arrived on the scene, it was already too late for those large acts of literary power ambition used to be good for.

Joyce had come and gone, leaving footprints both shallow and deep everywhere in Gaddis’s ground—the opening dash, for instance, as a substitute for quotation marks: a brilliantly significant smudge that allows no closure and dissolves voices into narrative, turning the clearest verisimilitude into something spectral. Gaddis, imperially equipped for masterliness in range, language, and ironic penetration, born to wrest out a Modernist masterpiece but born untimely, nonetheless took a long draught of Joyce’s advice and responded with surge after surge of virtuoso cunning. The Recognitions is a mocking recognition of the implausibility of originality: a vast fiction about fabrication and forgery, about the thousand faces of the counterfeit, and therefore, ineluctably, about art and religion. In the desert years of long ago, when I was a deluded young would-be writer tangled up in my own crapulous ambition, The Recognitions landed on my grim table (and on the grim tables of how many other aspirants to the holy cloak of Art?) and stayed there, month after month, as a last burnished talisman of—well, of Greatness, of a refusal to relinquish the latter-day possibilities of Joyce, Mann, James, Woolf, Proust, the whole sacral crew of those old solar boats. That, I think now, was a misreading of Gaddis’s chosen ground. He knew what monuments had gathered behind him, but—seizing Joyce’s dialogue-dash as staff—he willingly moved on. He was not imitating a received literature; he was not a facsimile Joyce.

Gaddis was, in fact—and is—new coinage: an American original. To claim this is to fall into Gaddis’s own comedy of “enamored parodies weighed down with testimonial ruins.” Originality is exactly what Gaddis has made absurd; unrecognizable. Yet if it is obligatory to recapitulate Gaddis’s mockery through the impact—the dazzling irruption—of his three-decadesold first novel, it is because The Recognitions is always spoken of as the most overlooked important work of the last several literary generations. Tony Tanner: “The critical neglect of this book is really extraordinary.” David Madden: “An underground reputation has kept it on the brink of oblivion.” Through the famous obscurity of The Recognitions, Gaddis has become famous for not being famous enough. Carpenter’s Gothic—a short novel, but as mazily and mercilessly adroit as the others—should mark a turning: it should disclose Gaddis’s terrifying artfulness, once and for all, to those whom tonnage has kept away. Carpenter’s Gothic may be Gaddis-in-little, but it is Gaddis to the brim.

The title itself, the name of an architectural vogue, is a dangerous joke. It alludes to a style of charm that dissembles—that resplendent carved-wood fakery seductively laid out along the Hudson a century ago, “built to be seen from the outside,” its unplanned insides crammed to fit in any which way—“a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions,” according to McCandless, the owner of one of these “grandiose visions. . . . foolish inventions. . . . towering heights and cupolas.” McCandless is a geologist, a novelist, a heavy smoker with a confusing past. He has locked up one room containing his papers, reserving the right to visit it, and rented the house to a young married couple, Paul and Elizabeth Booth. Paul, like the house, has grandiose visions. He works as a public relations man for the Reverend Ude’s evangelical operations, which reach as far as Africa; when Ude drowns a boy while baptizing him, Paul in his inventive fecundity—he is a desperately hollow promoter—twists this into a usable miracle. Liz, Paul’s wife—wistful, abused, hopeful, humble, herself quietly deceitful—is, along with her ne’er-do-well brother Billy, heir to a mining combine intent on scheming itself back into a business empire’s version of African colonialism. Paul, a combat veteran, was formerly bagman for the company under the chairmanship of Liz’s father, a suicide; the company is now in the hands of Adolph, the trustee. Adolph keeps Liz, Billy, and Paul on short rations. Obedient to Paul’s several scams, Liz goes from doctor to doctor, patiently pursuing an insurance fraud. McCandless reveals himself as the discoverer of the African gold the company is after, and seduces Liz. But there is no gold; McCandless is a lunatic impostor. In the end, brother and sister die of too much imposture.

All this crammed-in conspiring, told bare, is pointless soap-opera recounting. We have run into these fictional scalawags before, rotted-out families, rotted-out corporations, seedy greedy preachers and poachers, either in cahoots with or victims of one another, and sometimes both. They are American staples; but “plot” is Gaddis’s prey, and also his play. Triteness is his trap and toy. He has light-fingered all the detritus that pours through the news machines and the storytelling machines—the fake claims, fake Bible schools, fake holy water out of the Pee Dee River spreading typhus, a bought-and-paid-for senator, an armed “Christian survival camp,” fake identities (Paul, pretending to be a WASP Southerner, is probably a Jew), the mugger Paul kills. Plot is what Gaddis travesties and teases and two-times and swindles.

Yet these stereotypical illusions, these familiar dumping grounds of chicanery, turn to stony truths under Gaddis’s eye—or, rather, his ear. Gaddis is a possessed receiver of voices, a maniacal eavesdropper, a secret prophet and moralizer. His method is pure voice, relentless dialogue, preceded by the serenely poised Joycean dash and melting off into the panning of a camera in the speaker’s head. Speech is fragmented, piecemeal, halting and stunted, finally headlong—into telephones continually, out of radio and television. Through all these throats and machines the foul world spills. The radio is a perpetual chorus of mishap and mayhem, pumping out its impassive dooms while the human voice lamenting in the kitchen moans on:

—Problem Liz you just don’t grasp how serious the whole God damn thing is. . . . the bottle trembled against the rim of the glass,—after him they’re after me they’re after all of us. . . . He’d slumped back against word of two tractor trailer trucks overturned and on fire at an entrance to the George Washington bridge,—fit the pieces together you see how all the God damn pieces fit together, SEC comes in claims some little irregularity on a Bible school bond issue next thing you’ve got the IRS in there right behind with misappropriation of church funds for openers, problem’s their new computer down there’s just geared to their mailing list if they don’t build their mailing list there won’t be any funds what the whole God damn thing is all about, you get these Bible students they’re smart enough digging up Ephusians but they count on their fingers nobody knows where in hell the last nickel went,

and on and on: fire, death, fraud, money, voice voice voice. The voices are humanity seeping out, drop by drop, a gradual bloodletting. It isn’t “theme” Gaddis deals in (his themes are plain) so much as a theory of organism and disease. In Carpenter’s Gothic the world is a poisonous organism, humankind dying of itself.

The process is gargoylish: a vaudeville turn. Paul’s scribbled diagram of a promotion scheme, with all its arrows pointing cause-and-consequence, is mistaken for a map of the fourteenth-century Battle of Crecy. The “big ore find on the mission tract,” a lie, is designed to lure American military imperialism into Africa. Liz, roused against McCandless, cries out (quoting Paul muddying it up: Ephusians for Ephesians, now Clausnitz for Clausewitz), “Clausnitz was wrong, it’s not that war is politics carried on by other means it’s the family carried on by other means,” and McCandless, sneering at tribe against tribe, nation against nation, replies: “Well good God! They’ve been doing that for two thousand years haven’t they?”

McCandless is Gaddis’s strong seer, a philosophical trader in scourging tirades: “. . . talk about a dark continent I’ll tell you something, revelation’s the last refuge ignorance finds from reason. Revealed truth is the one weapon stupidity’s got against intelligence and that’s what the whole damned thing is about. . . . you’ve got enough sects slaughtering each other from Londonderry to Chandigarh to wipe out the whole damned thing. . . . just try the Children’s Crusade for a sideshow, thousands of kids led into slavery and death by a twelve year old with a letter from Jesus. . . .—all four horsemen riding across the hills of Africa with every damned kind of war you could ask for. . . . seven hundred languages they’ve all been at each other’s throats since the creation war, famine, pestilence, death, they ask for food and water somebody hands them an AK47. . . .” Paul, meanwhile, is Gaddis’s weak seer, discloser of the shoddy morning news: “Draw the line, run a carrier group off Mombasa and a couple of destroyers down the Mozambique channel, bring in the RDF and put the SAC on red alert. They’ve got what they want.”

Is Carpenter’s Gothic a “political” novel? An “apocalyptic” novel? A novel of original sin without the illusion of salvation? It is tempting to judge Gaddis as Liz finally judges McCandless: “Because you’re the one who wants it,” she accuses him, “to see them all go up like that smoke in the furnace all the stupid, ignorant, blown up in the clouds and there’s nobody there, there’s no rapture or anything just to see them wiped away for good it’s really you, isn’t it. That you’re the one who wants Apocalypse, Armageddon all the sun going out and the sea turned to blood you can’t wait no, you’re the one who can’t wait! . . . because you despise their, not their stupidity no, their hopes because you haven’t any, because you haven’t any left.” But not long after this outburst Liz learns from McCandless’s wife—who appears out of nowhere like a clarifying messenger—that McCandless was once in a mental hospital. Another clue hints at a frontal lobotomy. A world saturated in wild despair, and only in despair, turns out to be a madman’s image.

Even while he is handing over this straw of hope—that the evangelist of darkest calamity is deranged—Gaddis the trickster may be leading us more deeply into hopelessness. If McCandless, the god of the novel and its intellectual sovereign, the owner of that false-front house of disaster, whose pitiless portrait of our soiled planet we can recognize as exactly congruent with truth-telling—if McCandless is not to be trusted, then where are we? Does Gaddis mean us to conclude that whoever sees things-as-they-are in their fullest tragic illumination will never be credible except under the badge of lunacy? Or does he mean McCandless—whose name, after all, suggests he is the scion of darkness—to speak for the devil? And if so, is Gaddis on the devil’s side, if only because the devil is the most eloquent moralist of all? And a novelist to boot, whose papers are irredeemably scrambled in that secret messy room he is forever cleaning up, that room “like Dachau,” choked with smoke, where the Bible is stored upside down?

The true god of the novel—god of invention, commerce, and cunning—is of course mercurial Gaddis himself. He is a preternatural technician and engineer: whatever turns, turns out to turn again; things recur, allusions multiply, pretexts accrete, duplicities merge, greed proliferates, nuances breed and repeat. The center holds horribly: “you see how all the God damn pieces fit together.” No one in Carpenter’s Gothic is innocent or uninjured or unheard. It is an unholy landmark of a novel; an extra turret, so to speak, added on to the ample, ingenious, audacious Gothic mansion William Gaddis has slowly been building in American letters.

Published as “Fakery and Stony Truths,” The New York Times Book Review, July 7, 1985

Italo Calvino: Bringing Stories to Their Senses

Not long before his death in 1985, Italo Calvino undertook to write five stories on the five senses. He completed three—on the powers of tongue, ear, nostrils—gathered now in a nervous, narrow, dazing volume; a cerebral accident swept him away before he could arrive at the fingertips and the eye.

The trio of tales in Under the Jaguar Sun are not “experimental.” Calvino, an authentic postmodernist (despite the clamor, there are not so many of these), does not experiment: the self-conscious postmodernist is also a devil-may-care post-experimenter. No one has understood the gleeful and raucous fix—or tragedy—of the latter-day artist more penetratingly than Italo Calvino. The writer’s quest has traditionally been to figure out the right human questions to ask, and if we still love the novels of, say, George Eliot, it is because we are nostalgic for the sobriety of a time when the right questions could be divined. In the disorderly aftermath of Joyce, Kafka, Agnon, Borges, all the questions appear to be used up, repetitive, irrelevant; and their answers—which only recently did take on experimental form— have been marred by struggle, stoicism, and a studied “playfulness” more plucky than antic. After Kafka, after Borges, what is there to do but mope?

Calvino sets aside both questions and answers for the sake of brilliant clues and riddling intuitions. He gives up narrative destination for destiny, clarification for clairvoyance. He invents a new laughter suitable to the contemporary disbelief in story. In short, Calvino re-addresses—and magisterially re-enters—the idea of myth, of “the tale.” In earlier works, he imagined Marco Polo as Scheherazade, mesmerizing Kublai Khan with jewellike accounts of walls, images, weather, names, humors, fates; or he noted that “the objects of reading and writing are placed among rocks, grass, lizards, having become products of the mineral-vegetable-animal continuum.” He even invoked—in the exhilarating pages of If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler—a Father of Stories, “the universal source of narrative material, the primordial magma.” A learned, daring, ingeniously gifted magus, Calvino has in our own time turned himself into the Italian Grimm: his Italian Folktales, a masterwork of culling and retelling, is devoted precisely to the lure of the primordial magma—myth spawned by the body of the organic and inorganic world.

The three tales of Under the Jaguar Sun are, accordingly, engendered by the human nervous system—the body as a cornucopia of sensation, or as an echoing palace with manifold windows, each a shifting kaleidoscope. The Modernists have already hinted at how the fundamental story-clay, the myth-magma, can spring out of taste—remember Proust’s madeleine; or smell—Mann’s diseased Venice; or sound—Forster’s ou-boum in the Marabar Caves. Yet these merely metaphorical resonances will not content Calvino. He slides back behind them to the primary ground of perception: ganglia and synapse. He fuses fable with neuron. By driving story right down to its biological root, to cell and stimulus, he nearly annihilates metaphor. Calvino’s postmodernism is a literalism so absolute that it transports myth to its organic source, confining story to the limits of the mouth, the ear, the nose.

But what seems to be confinement and limitation—the mouth, after all, is only a little chamber—widens to rite and mystery. The title story opens with a scrupulous recounting of Mexican cuisine (the reader is likely to salivate), and winds up in a dazzlement of wit and horror. The narrator and Olivia, a tourist couple who are vaguely estranged, are in Mexico on a holiday. They are diligent about seeing the sights and obsessive about trying every exotic dish. The husband is somewhat apathetic (“insipid,” Olivia calls him, as if he needed seasoning) while Olivia is intense, inquisitive, perilously inspired. Her passion for food is sacerdotal, almost creedal. Studying her “voluptuous mastication,” the narrator is overcome by a revelation of his own: “I realized my gaze was resting not on her eyes but on her teeth. . . . which I happened to be seeing for the first time not as the radiant glow of a smile but as the instruments most suited to their purpose: to be dug into flesh, to sever it, tear it.”

Husband and wife investigate the “gastronomical lexicon” of various localities, including chiles en nogada, “wrinkled little peppers, swimming in a walnut sauce whose harshness and bitter aftertaste were drowned in a creamy, sweetish surrender,” and gorditaspellizcadas con manteca, “plump girls pinched with butter.” The very name of the latter returns them to their hotel room in a rare state of sexual arousal. And meanwhile their days are given over to exploring the ruins of ancient Aztec and Olmec civilizations— temples where human sacrifice was practiced, with the complicity of willing victims, by priests who afterward consumed a certain “ritual meal.” Olivia presses their guide to speculate on the possible flavors of that unspecified dish—following which, during a supper of shrimp soup and goat kid, the husband fantasizes that “I could feel my tongue lift me against the roof of her mouth, enfold me in saliva, then thrust me under the tips of the canines. . . . The situation was not entirely passive,” he reflects, “since while I was being chewed by her I felt also that I was acting on her, transmitting sensations that spread from the taste buds through her whole body.” Without such reciprocity, “human sacrifice would be unthinkable.”

Of course this is also a comic immersion in the psychology of that “universal cannibalism,” as the well-chewed narrator terms it, that “erases the lines between our bodies and. . . . enchiladas.’’ And incidentally makes marriages work.

If the mouth can both smile and devour, the ear is all petrified anxiety. To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne. In “The King Listens”—the crown of this extraordinary collection—the suspected eavesdropping of spies, unidentifiable movements and whispers, signals of usurpation, mysterious knockings, the very noise of the universe, imply terror and imprisonment. The ear turns out to be the most imagining organ, because it is the most accomplished at deciphering; still, on its own, it cannot be confident of any one interpretation, and wheels frenetically from conjecture to conjecture. In the end, the monarch around whom the life of the palace stirs does not know whether he is a king or a caged prisoner in the palace’s secret dungeon.

Transposition of ruler and ruled—the theme, to be sure, of Chekhov’s “Ward No. Six,” and even (more frivolously) of J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton. But Calvino’s mythopoetics has no theme; the primordial magma is beyond, and below, what story is “about.” And the palace itself, we soon recognize, is a maze leading to a tunnel: the configuration of the human ear.

The last and shortest tale—“The Name, the Nose”—is not, I think, a success, though here as in the others the brilliance of language never falters. Calvino’s aim is to juxtapose the primitive and the rococo, the coarse and the highly mannered, in order to reveal their congenital olfactory unity. To emphasize the bond of nose with nose, he constructs a somewhat blurry triptych. A decadent French gentleman visits Madame Odiles parfumerie